1. Effects of Health Information and Generic Advertising on U.S. Meat Demand
2. The Loss Function Has Been Mislaid: The Rhetoric of Significance Tests.;McCloskey;American Economic Review,1985
3. Selecting an index to control for “other” market movements presents a challenge between choosing an index that is too close to modeling the same price series in the analysis (e.g., having a near identity) and using an index that is too general and does not reflect relevant market movements. We felt an appropriate index falling in between these two extremes was the CRB foodstuffs index because the meat product futures being modeled are likely to respond to general foodstuff economic conditions. More specifically, the CRB food index is an unweighted geometric mean of lard, butter, soybean oil, cocoa, corn, Kansas City wheat, Minneapolis wheat, sugar, hog, and steer spot market price relatives. Naturally there are other supply and demand shocks that influence futures price changes. We have included the CRB index to attempt to control for such market movements; however, there are likely other factors that influence live cattle and lean hog futures prices. Controlling for all these movements would represent an extensive undertaking beyond the scope of this analysis. Because the study period spans 18 years and we examined over 100 recall events, the effects of other supply and demand shocks should be averaged out.
4. Chicago Mercantile Exchange. (1982–99). Daily futures market prices for live cattle and lean hog futures contracts.
5. The dependent variable could be formulated as percentage change or daily return to a futures contract, i.e., ln(P t ) – ln(Pt-1 ). Results are robust across alternative constructions of the dependent variable; thus discussion of the analysis is limited to the model using absolute price differences.